for a good evening this is artsy morse code skirvin and here it's of course nine pm moscow time and our top story the first funerals of healthy russians republic of tartar stand as the country mourns victims of sunday's pleasure cruise a sinking on the volga river over ninety deaths have been confirmed so far many of them children meanwhile the search for dozens of bodies trapped under water continues. for the lower house of the french parliament votes to extend the military campaign in libya that's well analysts highlighting consistencies in paris

is from think attempts to find ways out of the law including a recent suggestion that the rebels have negotiated with colonel gadhafi. and wiki leaks founder julian assange is back in a london court fighting an earlier decision to extradited to sweden over sex crime allegations but his supporters say the case is just a pretext handed over to the u.s. . that's coming up now on r.t. award winning report for you about how whole communities in america's west virginia were driven arthur land by flooding and landslides resulting from a mountain top coal mining. legler a leg

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the earth is millions of years old coal particularly interesting because per unit of the better gene generated coal actually it may be the cheapest fuel but it also releases the world's cope with it to pick up a serious curb. beginning at the earliest with the development of the steam engine in the late seventy's and early eighty's hundreds it wouldn't be good to. extract fossil carbon from the earth's crust coal oil natural gas even to the absence of humans over time period it would be uplifted and subject to a rotation it would return to the atmosphere but those rates are tiny compared to the ability of humans to go out with large machines to deliver a large quantities of this material to the surface of the earth where it is burned

and it will use the generation of editing we have larger quitman that was introduced on surface lands about twenty five years ago you know last thing which accounted for the the ability to recover coal seams that heretofore been unmanageable the use of drag on stuff manning scenes that were an economical. and even physically impossible. without the use of that. many people twenty five years ago when the first company said the right ragland they were laughed at and they said there's no way in the world you get a piece of equipment like that on the narrow bridge of the southern appalachians and they were determined through engineering abilities and persistence to make certain that it worked and and it hands.

the man was. playing. lucy. was just a little be. some. easy games. sleaziness for. the sleep problems. plague like these little children i'm sorry little children will be protected this time from treatment or your family can currently.

make your way out of people to come real or not come here to have. them in mind and i guess be able to find a good match because i'm a parent comes from a parent finds her the miracle or think exactly nurtured to destroy her reaction lowered to get. her to her remarkable. place. and explain your partner at. least. to some other. sleep. but never the light down my pepys or something. needs to keep her desperate to meet community snap if dismantling if you. watch these levels of god

there is no more afterlife. there is no more with the game it don't grow back it's not going to come back i mean you know we have a politician get up on t.v. go he said well the reason again saying it's being thanked that theory. or about this thousand acre. site that's nothing the garage sale process mountaintop removal coal mining is an awesome display of coal extraction engineering it is also quite simple once a site is it in a flood you're cutting begins next explosives are used to blast away the earth and period progress pools and. then machinery including massive shovels called drag lines rufio river which is then deposited in adjacent valleys called valley fills mountaintop removal coal mining can bring down the elevation of

a peak like hundreds of feet sites are often thousands of acres in size but i think it's our latest action rather than plattsburgh and really. in the spring of two thousand and five a group of activists college students and local citizen conservation groups joined together to oppose the widespread increase in mountaintop removal mines throughout southern appalachian training the group called their campaign mountain just this summer there was going to be kind of this renewal of coal mining going to sea and some of those mines are going to be you know miles however little minds. you know we were like hey this is you know now we're dealing with this issue too it's not just an issue of kentucky and west virginia like hey let's put something together and kind of up the level of opposition to this issue of let's help make this issue a national issue that everybody has the dealing. say what they're doing.

since some why is there a divide in our community. i've got nothing against free speech but when you come in here demanded people's jobs and closure schools they own. and i and all that you lucky don't get hurt her but. if somebody is in california or north carolina or new york city they're connected to mountaintop removal because they're turning on the lights they're opening strategy was to draw attention to a school situated close to a mountaintop removal site. west virginia. i'm on his own by massey energy america's fourth largest coal producer marsh fork elementary is a very very scary situation they have two point eight billion gallons of koestler which is why it's talks and it's toxic material it has arsenic lead line marjorie chromium there's a lot of really really bad chemicals in this sludge there is

a lake at the two point eight billion gallons of coast guard sitting behind this elementary school four hundred yards on top of a mine. there's two hundred twenty eight kids in the school. the sophistication of engine nearing it goes into the construction of the ins as i suspect not duplicated in any other physical structure anywhere in in the world in one hundred seventy two buffalo creek there was this disaster where one of these impoundments basically blew out millions of gallons of this nasty sludge water went barreling down a small holler and killed one hundred twenty five people just with four thousand houses a thousand cars and you know hundreds of people were injured. besides the danger of flooding while you know the residents are concerned about the health effects posed to school children from the coal processing facility located directly

behind marsh fork elementary so it's history hundred feet away three hundred feet away it made sense directly cause the river and you've got serious feel probably got to magnetite you've got to walk you've got the ammonia that they use with the bad. i use diesel fuel in there right now it's always slept together we've got by a headache all the time you got i asked him are problems occur more more down or i mean here's. the thing ok it's. with eye opener in allow them to keep a close call we. just drain and all the time the kids are coming home with blisters and their little tiny blisters the size of a painted are when they're mild. but not everyone shares their concerns in the small community where many residents work for the coal industry that surrounds them

to power i think counterpoint to if i was scared i would not let her go there and she will be in first grade she was in kindergarten last year played on high ground three times a day and more like college players and like i say he never came home helping dirty with color or you know any big mess and i had manacle records that prove this he has not had anything other than a common cold up like any other people in our child so. we. have. been. frustrated local school and government officials you know action on improving safety at marsh work elementary is one of his granddaughter kayla attends more sports column entry launches the pennies a promise campaign to raise six million dollars to build a new school and so with us here. at. the site there is a criminal. money to build. and let's see one of the older kids.

because i don't like. to start the pennies or promise campaign wiley and his granddaughter kayla present the governor with over four hundred dollars in paintings he orders a collector. would like to see the governor we have some money to present him. and so the story of the . step down kids everywhere like you are doing a good to see you have a young lady here for more for cable adventure it's like a pair you are serious in this it's. eight items for people to start. school since. i was going to start. and. it's. ok i have

a little table here for you but this is our pm ok. now we're going to just you know cause i know we worked on this some we talked about the force of the school yes or no to school were we at with the local board of education to start all over sure that smack up a whole lot or not go get them you took a sworn or stuck project away from what's we're going to use it women has it would fill in for you today ok you know you and i were not going to do what we've been doing you put a price on our children so you know when you store dislike of which ration in our state he put a price this is not an environmental issue this is a little human being i have tried for two years to work with you on this and i've been ignored and i don't mean to put you in a soft spot here you're good enough is enough enough it's enough we need to get this took care of your business what these coal companies it is your business your politics this is not about politics we're asking people for money all of this

country today's our official announcement of it so it's just it's just in a superior stages we're going to raise five to ten million dollars it's going to happen we want you to be a part of this we want you to support our efforts we want to help you and we're better jobs and i appreciate i don't mean to be upset and aggressive but if this was your child would you not be rough you know that you know happens and she's beautiful so what we've seen we care about our children down there and there are serious problems with a lot of issues and i know you're aware of there's insemination going on there a lot of intimidation a teacher spoke out last year and now he's been talking for so. what are you going to now do everything in my car that i want that means that i do everything in my garage guys but then we got a. journalist jeff goodell is book big coal the dirty secret behind america's energy future explores the history and use of coal in america and throughout the world like many americans i didn't even realize that we still burn coal you know i thought coal was something that went out with top hats and corsets i thought that

electricity was just something that flowed down from a golden bowl in the sky i never gave any thought to where it came from the idea that coal producing fifty percent of electricity in america never occurred to me so i went out to west virginia and i didn't know what to expect i remember i first knew i was driving outside of charleston and i saw the boom on one of the big drag wind swinging above the hills and i pulled off the road and i hiked up through the woods to the top of this hill and i got this view down into history and it was just like hell had opened up before me. and the money from the coal mining has always gone to the top and siphoned out by through the owners essentially whether their corporations are called barons like i'd like i'm sure it's a commodity business every penny they have to spend for safety for wages for health care or anything like that is money that they see coming directly out of their

pocket and you know the history of coal mining is very clear on this there's no it's not a subtle thing you know this is an industry that views workers as this supposable and views the landscape as disposable and it's all about getting the coal out of the ground is quickly. oh it fills me with. an unloved disco with you bottom you still like. if you start out in the manners you had to have those tools and they let you get them on created that company still. for about three presses put it this way love your cocaine save company stores they hard you lived in your kochi if you worked with me in the mall kitchen some i also store mine and one of the others on matters

that are still owed the company store you could pay just want playable. he made company money scrip and or place it wasn't you it was company store as i got an updated script brits work more today and it was. right. you surely help you know you could make more. right here's erica trick question so use mail to kill the chick to. give you hand call aids stamp you number of what you got your car loaded with coal somewhere on this car you and i we checked. i would be a mule driver well times i'd be go on board. in one state school he would probably need to go and hear drop it off unhook each meal from it on the phone. right now it really is the loud rock you make you call it and we show you why you

got a water tank in a slot. of the little water group in your career a bad writer. and the spirit is good but it works pretty good. growth number one or three. you look at the history of our area faithfully they with big communities that are they with cake rings big companies still worth everything rotten painful i mean company have all down that river or stuff and set their. our schools are good because there's no work all with the were close and nothing's coming back things are out of state people with this coal company in their prime can take an entire week and never put out the bark it's all good to go early with junior broke and gone to be gone there were.

five years. top removal site moved into the head waters of the string that runs from a home in the past five years i've been flooded seven times there's been about five acres of my property it's washed away into the stream down below where i live. my properties been completely devastated devalued there's no way i could say one relocate my property it's worth it the mining company had the option to get in touch with me and let me know what was coming at me and they'd be they trapped me and my kids the flooding hollow and basically trashed our lives now when someone does that to you you don't go along with it you have no choice but to go against i go home to it i live in the middle of this

block. because it's ok it's ok that maybe he'll be away from somewhere where is the middle of this hailstorm i asked my son. grown. i don't know nobody nothing and i don't own these million jobs i know i'm john and it's like thank god they're day and wrong across appalachians coal fields mining jobs are vital to local economies my husband forthwith and i think for fifty i'm going on here so we'll just we really appreciate lassie that's where we get our money that you know our way of living but traditional deep mining requires more workers and mountaintop removal since nine hundred fifty the total number of mining jobs has steadily decreased from approximately one hundred twenty thousand to less than twenty thousand today over the same period coal production

has steadily increased many coalfield residents are also concerned about another byproduct of coal production slurry pons. the slurry impoundments the way that we dispose of the refuse that comes from the cleaning of coal. which is literally nothing but dirt and rock i mean that's where you are separating from the coal so that's what you're disposing of it's not toxic it's not you know as people many people would like you to believe that you're suddenly it's the indigenous rock that is caught up in the coal seam and that natural material includes mercury lead arsenic and a whole suite of heavy metals which as long as they're in that rock you can drink the water because they will be underground they'll be they will not be exposed to oxygen if you don't disturb them they will not be brought into solution and you can literally some of the best water we have in west virginia comes out of

a coal seam but when you disturb that rock and start grinding it up into fine particles adding a whole bunch of chemical additives to it to get it to separate the coal from the other inorganic materials then you come up with this weeks of brew material that you would want any exposure to it all we know almost nothing about it i've got a database now has fourteen samples worldwide of coal slurry that are in the public domain six of these are from the post martin county you know the biggest environmental disaster in the southeastern united states six samples representing what that material that entered our rivers and streams really is which often read a prosperous three hundred nine million gallons taking over fifty miles of a major river system a spill bigger than the exxon valdez we took six samples the occurrence that happened in kentucky. was simply one where you had one built over old.

underground once and they gave way in the bottom and that's what happened the structure itself to. go county west virginia within sight of massey energy c.e.o. don blankenship sume karma leader brown has been battling proclaimed want to be. twenty some years ago had. our not our water turned black sprite and i asked are the hollering and screaming match has gone got up and asked and asked me what was wrong he came here and he said when he wrote that he said i want god he said that's postcard. we went and looked at fifteen wells. said the samples off to the laboratory got the testing results back and then some analysis on those results and it was pretty compelling that we needed to do more research down there i've never seen water quality that poor. pretty good compared to what it was this morning these documents from the west virginia

department of natural resources researched by mountain just a summer ball and cheers are permits for coal slurry injections that took place in the early one nine hundred eighty s. at the slurry impoundment located approximately two miles above carmelita brown's own. this permit shows that over two hundred million gallons of slurry was injected in nineteen eighty-four in one thousand nine hundred five this permit describes three injections in one thousand nine hundred four into an abandoned underground mine at the rate of six hundred gallons per minute the basis for. injecting. coal slurry and other things other wastes underground as an e.p.a. one thousand nine hundred eighty sed study called underground injection control well that's the oxymoron of the century underground injection control and what control do we have when we inject something underground i have no idea where it goes. by if i as the air that was to pull out from laurel for some reason west bank

record one day of all the stories you know who's responsible for that account we got the paperwork we know that calories are responsible for the cleanup of the full recovery. tell me go ahead and really nobody wanted to help us nobody want nobody was concerned and it wasn't only me it was oh my neighbors at them it's right oh the patients i see for all have significant medical problems other people don't have. a greater number of people with all timers disease and old timers disease memory loss of say a great number of people who have numbness and tingling of their arms and legs which indicates a heavy metal. accumulation much seemed a fair amount of of just ill health my next door neighbors on a kidney dialysis another neighbor among his own is his last kidney had had to have a kidney transplant i have problems with my kidneys the timea water exposes them to

many types of metals cadmium and among others because this can lead to huge. disabled people not necessary has lost babies i have carried them six months and have maybe stillborn.